TNS Research claims that an amazing 18% of people now listen to music on their mobile phones, while acknowledging that the US lags behind at a mere 4%.

I’m a little sceptical of the 18% figure actually - I wouldn’t be surprised if only 18% of mobiles could play music. But if it’s true, it’s a validation for the Convergionists, who believe that all devices will end up converged into one - as opposed to the Separatistas, who believe that one device can’t possibly do anything as well as a specialist one and that people will continue to prefer to own lots of devices to do different things.

Let’s put the 18% into perspective. This means that 360,000,000 people are listening to music on their mobiles, based on a worldwide penetration of 2 billion mobile phones. In contrast, I’d guesstimate* that there are only about 150 million (maximum) MP3 players ever sold to date.

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* I tried hard to find a stat showing worldwide shipments of MP3 players, but searched in vain. So my assumptions in arriving at 150 million are below. If anyone has a better figure, I’d be happy to use it.

iSuppli says that worldwide shipments of MP3 devices was 36.8 million in 2004, according to this article. Estimates for 2005 are about 58 million, making sales in the last 2 years about 95 million in total. This allows 55 million sales for 2001 - 2003, which I believe to be more than generous.

In fact, I’d say that there are a maximum of 100 million MP3 players in use. The vast majority of MP3s made in 2001 would have long been junked in favour of a newer model.